My father, Irv, was not called the D.U., the Dreaded Unit, for nothing.   He relentlessly inflicted tremendous damage, most of the time in a manner subtle enough to make you believe that you were the enraged two year-old, not him.  

As he was dying he admitted, for the first time, that he had been the enraged two year-old all along.  A brilliant one, without a doubt, but an emotional fucking two-year old.  

“My life was over by the time I was two,” he told me with great sadness and defeat as he began to make his peace before he shuffled off this mortal coil.   I had by then learned as much as I could about the childhood he never spoke of.  I knew exactly what he was talking about, how his tiny spirit had been broken.  I was at a point in my life, and he in his, when I could finally react with sympathy, which spurred him to be as open and honest as he was able to be.

To put the blessing of this deathbed reconciliation into perspective, it is useful to compare it to another reconciliation between a difficult parent and long-suffering adult child.

I had a good friend who visited his mother in France almost every summer.  When he came back he’d be in a black mood for days, sometimes weeks.  

“Why do I bother continuing to go to visit that bitch?” he’d say, “it’s Einstein’s fucking definition of insanity.  Every time I go, I expect an insane, ice cold bitch to suddenly become the mother I always needed…”

One summer when he came back I put my tongue into my cheek and asked him if he’d had a nice time with his mother.  

“Oh, my God!” he said, “I did, you won’t believe it.  She was the same, like always, and I was kicking myself for going, like always, and then, the last night, we drank two bottles of wine and she started telling me me about her life.  She told me about the abuse of her childhood for the first time, how she was raped, things I never imagined, terrible shit.  She began to cry.  She told me she knew she’d been a shit mother and begged me to forgive her, thanked me for never giving up on her.   I hugged her and told her it was OK.  We talked until dawn, until I had to get in the cab to go to the airport.  I can’t wait to go back and see her.  I feel like I just found my mother, like I just met her for the first time.  It was amazing, man!”

A beautiful and rare story.  

The next time he saw her, about six weeks later, was after her massive stroke.  His sister called and he jumped on the first plane.  He found his mother lying, filthy and unable to move, in a pool of her own waste, in a French public ward.  He immediately got her out of the hospital into a rented apartment, had his sister stay with her while he rushed back to New York, wrapped up his affairs, and moved to France to take care of her. 

When she was able to speak a few words again she struggled to tell him she wanted to die.  He told her if she still felt that way in a year, he would help her die, not to worry.  But she had to promise, in exchange, to let him help her live.    

He spent the next few years lighting her cigarettes, driving her around, doing physical therapy with her, making her laugh.  She made a lot of progress under his loving, constant care.   She recovered some of her ability to speak, slowly over the course of many, many months.  She regained the ability to laugh, too. Sadly, I lost touch with him after a while.  It is the most wonderful and inspiring story  about a reconciliation with a difficult parent I know.  

The last-night-of-his-life reconciliation with my difficult father felt to me like a great blessing to us both at the time.  Thank God, I thought, I’d had the chance to hear the brutal fucker apologize, tell me that the long, senseless war between us had been his fault, that I’d been right and he’d been wrong, that he’d felt me reaching out many times over the years but had been too fearful and fucked up to reach back.  

It was certainly a blessing to Irv, as he was dying, to hear his son, calmly priest-like in the face of his anguished confession, telling him over and over that he had done the best he could, that if he could have done it differently he would have.  

I’ve had more than a decade now to consider the blessing to me.

“How’s that blessingy, changey thing working out fer yuh?” asked the skeleton in an eerily perky, more than passing Sarah Palin imitation.  

“You know, it was a great blessing to me, no doubt, and I’m very grateful that you were at a point in your life when you didn’t want to hurt me back.  I have to say, though, I don’t really know that it was a such great a blessing to you, to be brutally frank about it.  

“Hey, if it had come two weeks earlier, maybe, and we’d really had a chance to talk and talk and get to the bottom of some things.  I mean, the way it happened, I kind of went down a checklist of my deepest regrets, expressed each one and you told me it was okay.”  The skeleton gave a little chuckle.  

“Hah, I did notice that long pause after I told you I thought you and your sister always knew that, in a pinch, I was always there for you.  You can hear the silence hanging in the air like pestilence. You hear it continue and continue and then I say ‘well, you can never be sure about that…’ and went on to the next item on my checklist.  

 “I felt like a horse’s ass then, as I said more than once at the time, and I feel like one now– to have waited until I was only hours from my death to start trying to tell my children how much I loved them, how proud I was of them, how sorry I was for putting obstacles in their way instead of helping them find their way around obstacles, as a father who is not insane should always do.”  

The skeleton looked off into the distance, toward the Hudson River that was not far away, but invisible from his hilltop grave. 

The boys would be woken suddenly by their hysterical mother in the black Peekskill night during the Depression.  They were probably already up because there was a loud ruckus going on, voices yelling, thumping, glass shattering in the hall over their heads.  Their mother would send them out into the street with an urgent “gai roof Eli!” — go call Eli!  The little family at 1123 Howard Street didn’t have a phone, so the boys would be sent sprinting to Eli’s place a few blocks away. 

I can picture the little urchins running down the empty street, their feet slapping on the pavement.  While they ran, a drunken Jew was screaming at their father, sometimes more than one.   These indigent, itinerant Jews were sent over to board overnight by the synagogue.  They probably paid my grandparents a nickel or dime to stay there, or maybe the shul paid.  

My grandfather would regard the snarling drunken Jew with two eyes, a nose and a mouth, as if to say “why are you doing this?  What kind of person doesn’t know you don’t shit in a paper bag and throw the bag out the third story window?  That you don’t piss off the side of the bed you’re sleeping in.  Why are you acting like you’re crazy? Just walk down the stairs and use the toilet, like a normal Jew.  How in the world can you be such a jerk? ”  His face, which carried almost no expression, would not be judging them, just mildly registering his incomprehension. 

Eli told me that my grandfather Eliyahu was a big, strong man, well over six feet and well-built, but he was no fighter.   Eli was small, and broad, and had been fighting since he could stand, would be straining against his restraints and fighting from his death bed eighty-six years later.  It was nothing to Eli to throw somebody down a flight of stairs, if the situation absolutely demanded it.  

So when Eli showed up, mad as hell from being woken once again, he’d bark and the Jewish drunks would grab their gunny sacks and get the hell out of the house.  From time to time they’d put up a fight, and Eli would be happy to hold up his end.  

I can only imagine what his two little first cousins must have been thinking on those occasions.

“No pressure, Elie,” began the skeleton, launching into one of the archly meta passages that any prudent editor would immediately prune from this already over 600 page manuscript, “but, if you don’t start selling at least some of these pages, getting some of it in print, compiling a short published stack you can send to prospective literary agents, samples that will light up those little 20% dollar signs in their shrewd, shiny eyes, you’re pretty much done.  

“Not just as a writer, but as a person, I would say,” he said.  

Sure you would say that, no skin off your nose, now that you’re a skeleton. You know, dad, every time I hear the phrase ‘no skin off my nose’ I shudder, having skin, like you did, scalpeled from my nose twice, crudely covered by grafted skin from behind my ear.  I’m long overdue for the next slice, I’m afraid, on the other side of my nose.

“Well, none of us are without imperfections,” said the skeleton in another phrase destined for the cutting room floor.   “But you realize, I mean, I’m pretty sure you understand how insane your current plan is.  I don’t mean insane like totally mad, I mean it in the kinder, gentler sense of a laughably outlandish long-shot.  

“Of course, you can argue that from time to time you can move a reader, get a wheezy chuckle, that you’ve worked on your craft for decades, gotten pretty good at choosing words that mean exactly what you want to say.”  

And not wasting too much of the reader’s time.  

“Well, the reader of this particular selection might disagree, but anyway, the point is, no matter how well you might write– nobody but a madman expects to live and support himself by writing alone. I would argue that you’re too smart to have such an idiotic plan.”

Deft compliment/bitch slap, dad.   I’d agree with you if that was the whole plan.  It is one piece, one small piece.  You see, to tell you the truth, the writing is the smallest part of the plan.  

“Do tell,” said the skeleton.  

You’d like that, wouldn’t you?  

“Look, Elie, it’s no skin off the front of my skull,” said the skeleton. “I’m just trying to be helpful.  Most writers have another line of work they do to pay the bills, that’s all I’m saying.  Your boy Kafka worked in a bank, wrote all night, every night once he got home. Well, maybe Kafka’s not the best example, he died in a sanitarium, I think, worked himself to death and was completely unknown as a great writer in his lifetime.  

“How about Frederick Exley, that was a hell of a book, that chronicle of ‘the long malaise that was my life’… well, maybe he wasn’t the best example either, except maybe as a cautionary tale.  Look at this from your Wikipedia:

In 1961 Exley received a provisional appointment as clerk and crier of the courts inJefferson County, New York, where a lawyer friend, Gordon Phillips (the model for “the Counselor” in A Fan’s Notes), asked Exley to forge a signature on a check for one of his clients, an action that led to Phillips’ disbarment.^[8]

“I mean, look, on the other hand,” continued the skeleton, “you could wind up producing something that would make us all proud, me here moldering in my grave in Peekskill, your mother in her plastic bag in that box in the beautiful paper shopping bag a few feet from where you’re typing.  I mean, Frederick Exley was pretty fucked up, too.  And yet, as your Wiki informs us:

A Fan’s Notes was published in September 1968, and although early sales were not good, its release prompted widespread critical acclaim. The novel, about a longtime failure who makes good by finally writing a memoir about his pained life, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and received the William Faulkner Award for best first novel, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award.

“End of his troubles, Elie?  Think again.  But look, here’s a great line about a work based on the life’s work of the lifelong alcoholic:  with humor as black as Exley’s liver, Clarke picks apart the fictions we tell one another — and those we tell ourselves.    Not bad, eh?  There are some clever bastards out there, Elie.”

You’re really not helping, dad.  Pleasant though it also is to shoot the shit with you in a way that involves neither an exchange of bullets nor an invitation to exchange fisticuffs.  

“Damn it, Elie, that $84,000 debt for law school you took on was worth every penny!” said the skeleton, resting his case.

A day or two after my father died, my uncle handed me a several page document he had typed up, single spaced; an obituary for his brother Irv.  Thinking about it now, he must have written it before he left for Florida to sit by his brother’s deathbed.  

“Call the New York Times and have them put this obituary in the paper,” he instructed me.

It was longer than the obituaries for most popes and twice as tedious.  I read the first few paragraphs, wondering about the wealth of senseless detail, everything my uncle could remember about his life with his brother, their childhood in Peekskill.  

The readers of the New York Times would surely want to read about the pride the two young First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill members felt as they marched down Main Street in Peekskill under the banner of the shul, presumably in their Boy Scout uniforms, or some impoverished facsimile thereof.   The details poured out, not badly written, but clearly not the tight obituary prose of a former journalist setting out the who, what, when, where, why and how.  Page after page of this.  

Needless to say, I didn’t rush the obit to the New York Times to be set in type.  I set the pages on a table, I don’t remember what happened to them.  Which is sad because they would be of some use here.  

The lost New York Times obit is ironic, and fitting as a final act of post-death penance, because my father read the New York Times obituaries every day of his adult life.  His obituary never appeared in the Times or in any paper, except perhaps as a short item in the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill monthly bulletin.

As adults, my uncle often cringed around his brother, and laughed that scraping, inhaled laugh of his, and they generally seemed quite familiarly uncomfortable around each other.  As my father was dying, in the days preceding his last breath, he kept asking about his brother.  “Is my brother on his way?” he wanted to know.   My uncle rushed to the hospital, arriving the day after I did.  I picked him up at Fort Lauderdale airport.  

In the hall outside my father’s hospital room he stopped the doctor to ask about the possibility for a liver transplant for his almost 81 year-old brother in the final stage of liver cancer, abdomen swollen with ascites, kidneys already shutting down.  

Years earlier my uncle had instructed his daughter, Ann, who died tragically young of an aggressive cancer she had been told she’d beaten, that he wanted every heroic measure taken to prolong his life.  Measures currently in existence and future technologies that would be developed while he was kept viable, if not completely alive, in cryogenic suspension. 

“He basically told me he wants to be kept alive as a brain in a jar, until they invented a way to graft his brain into a head on a new young body,” said Ann.  

I gently but firmly pulled my uncle away from the doctor.   In my father’s room he made little jokes, and laughed at them himself to demonstrate that they were jokes.  This may seem a very cruel way to portray a man who was losing his only brother, who was seeking some kind of closeness and closure he’d never had with his big brother, who was now suddenly dying.  It may be cruel, I don’t know, but it is also as it was.  

It was very poignant for my sister and me to watch the way these two tormented boys from Peekskill clung to each other in the hospital as the older one readied himself to breathe one last time.  I don’t know that they talked about anything profound, I doubt it.  I have no idea what they said to each other.  It’s hard to believe they did more than keep each other company and feel the love for each other they’d been mostly unable to feel for the entirety of their long lives. That is no small thing, of course.  

A few years earlier my father stayed at my uncle’s house for some reason, maybe related to my first cousin Ann’s memorial.  In the days before her death Ann had made herself invisible to her parents, hidden the location of the hospice she was in during her last days out of fear her parents would show up and make a scene, demand that she come home.  I was at Ann’s memorial, actually, so I don’t remember exactly what the occasion was for my father overnighting alone in Kensington, Maryland with my aunt and uncle.  

I do remember what my father said immediately after he got back to Florida from the visit.  It is as wonderful an example of his style as I have preserved.  I recall it today verbatim because I wrote it on the drawing I was fiddling with as we spoke on the phone.  I asked how my uncle was doing.  He paused for one or two beats.  “Well, we can talk about that when I see you next week, but for now, let’s just say, he remains unchanged.”   I always admired the sleek compression of the statement.    

At any rate, (a phrase my father often used), I do not seem to have the claustrophobically detailed obit my uncle wrote.  I don’t think it was in digital form, I didn’t find it with the rest of the Irv-related emails and other files on the computer.  I don’t think the pages are in the heavy paper folder I kept with my father’s funeral and headstone arrangements. I will look for it again, though I doubt I have it.  Thus I don’t have the little odd details of their childhood in Peekskill to flesh out here. I will set out the few I remember hearing from my uncle before and after the funeral, as we passed places in Peekskill that jogged his memories. 

“My brother sees everything through rose colored glasses, he lives in a world of wonder, everything is an adventure to him,” my father told me more than once.  “He once saw a guy filling a soda machine and he said ‘oh, Irv, I wish you had been there.  You would have loved it, the guy had this thing with wheels and all the colors of soda were piled on it, and he rolled the cans down these curly chutes, oh, man, it was so cool, you should have seen it!’   That’s a great quality, I think.”

At the same time, he remained unchanged.  ‘Let’s just say,’ my father said, ‘he remains unchanged.’   We both knew very well what he meant.  Although my father believed people could not fundamentally change, my uncle’s failure to do the impossible was nonetheless very distressing.  

My uncle was mild-mannered, cornily playful and always ready to laugh.  I was an adult before I saw his furious temper for the first time.  He was a raging tyrant.  My mother had always hated my seemingly gentle, playful uncle and I never knew why.  She had seen his angry, rigid, controlling side early on.  

As adults my sister and I, confronted for the first time with his quick, unaccountable rage, his operatic irrationality, suddenly knew why our mother felt that way about him.  Holy shit, it was a rude awakening, as they say.  We couldn’t get away from him fast enough, aborting our weekend plans to get the hell out of there early the following day.  

“Take your garbage with you!” he snarled, clamping his hand on the lid of the garbage can I was attempting to put a small bag of car garbage into before we drove off.  When I got back into the car still holding the little bag of fast food wrappers, and quoted our uncle, my sister and her husband cracked up.  We were relieved to be hurrying back toward the interstate. 

But those last few days at the hospital when our father was dying, after sitting by the bed all day, joined by a couple of final guests, attended at various times by my mother, sister and brother-in-law, my uncle would not leave his brother’s side.  

“Go ahead, Paul,” my father told him at last, “Elie will stay with me. You guys have been sitting here all day, why don’t you take a break, go get something to eat.  It’s OK, really.”  He said all this very reasonably, and they all got up and went down to the cafeteria.  

He turned to me when they were gone and said “I don’t know how to do this.”

I assured him that nobody did, that it would be fine, not to worry.  I was remembering what the doctor had told me about how peaceful death by kidney failure is.  “You just kind of go to sleep,” is how he put it.  I was hoping that would be the case, silently helping him along, after the nurse helped me take down the divider on the side of his bed so I could sit closer to him.  His death was pretty much as the doctor had said, the breaths just became shallower and shallower until they stopped.  The whole process took maybe twenty minutes.

When he was done breathing, I closed his eyes with two fingers of one hand, like in the movies, and gave the oxygen tube back to the nurse, who had discreetly left us and had tiptoed back in after a respectful interval.  “He won’t be needing this,” I told her.  

I remember the moment very well, it was a Friday at sunset, toward the end of Passover.  The sun had sunk low in the Florida sky, the sky was stained beautiful pinks and oranges behind the darkening silhouettes of palm trees.  

When everybody got back up to the room they cried and I told them about his last moments, how peacefully he’d gone.  My mother was in anguish that she hadn’t gotten to say goodbye to him, wanted to know how he could leave her without letting her say goodbye.   I reassured her as best I could.  The nurse assured us all that many men send everyone away when it’s time to die, that most men can’t die in front of a bunch of loved ones.  “It’s too hard for them,” she suggested.  I imagine she’s right.

My sister and I took my mother back to the apartment where she’d live the next five years as a lonely widow.  My uncle and my brother-in-law stayed with my father’s dead body until late in the night. They stayed by his bed until the crew from the morgue finally came up and got him, and then they sat in the morgue with him until the folks from the Chevrai Kadisha, the Jewish burial society, came to take him and prepare the body for burial, and shipment back up to Peekskill for his eternal rest.

My mother or father suggested I draw a logo for brand new Tain Lee Chow, the kosher Chinese restaurant they were about to open, something they could put on their menu and on their sign.  I did a few drawings of a comical dragon, it had a lot of personality and was unique, idiosyncratic.  My mother laughed, I’m pretty sure, when she saw it.  

The face was fairly cute, it was a playful Chinese dragon trying to be fierce but posing no real threat, but like I say, it was idiosyncratic. My mother probably laughed because the thing was cute and it was also very much one of my drawings, that is to say, there was also something a little disturbing about the expression on the dragon’s face.

“Well,” said the skeleton, “you came by those things honestly, cute and disturbing” and he made a self-effacing gesture toward himself. 

You were certainly both of those things.  Anyway, you two took the drawing to your partner Benjy.  The verdict was Benjy didn’t like it and you used some generic clip-art dragon, or I don’t even remember what.  Outside of Benjy’s creative and whimsical names for dishes — “My Bashaert”, described as  “the perfect marriage of beef and chicken” was a favorite– the take out menu and sign for the successful restaurant were as generic as those of any Chinese restaurant.  

“Well, Benjy was the businessman, none of us knew anything about branding, marketing, trade design, that kind of thing.  Neither did you, ” said the skeleton.  “You want to make this about mom and me once again not taking your side, preferring our surrogate son Benjy to you, respecting his arbitrary judgment and crude tastes more than your’s, but that’s not a fair version of this story.  

“Your dragon was, how did that hack at that on-line rag describe your ‘beautifully written’ story about mom– the one he was going to pay for then decided not to publish– ‘too personal, somehow’.   It was a beautiful drawing but not right for Tain Lee Chow, a small business we’d invested a lot of money in, trying to get off the ground and succeed, that was it.  It was strictly a business decision and we deferred to the business manager.”

I’m aware of all that, obviously.  I’m bringing this up because I noticed, in the eulogy, that the part about your surrogate son Benjy reads:

With a partner he met at Tel Yehuda he opened the first Glatt Kosher Chinese restaurant in Queens. He ran “Tain Lee Chow” for several years with his partner and a Chinese chef, named, coincidentally, Mr. Chow.

“Wow,” said the skeleton, “I didn’t notice that as they were burying me.  I was a bit preoccupied, I suppose, but that’s… wow, like those guys from the new regime who went into the tomb of the deposed Pharaoh and scraped his face off the walls, off history, erasing him and his line from eternity.  Sonny Chow gets in there, but not Benjy, a very nice touch. That’s some good work, Elie.”

I hadn’t evolved enough by then to understand how much it would have meant to Benjy, standing by the grave grieving for a person he loved, to have heard his name mentioned as your partner and lifelong friend.  Here’s how I should have written it: 

With Benjy, their lifelong friend from Tel Yehuda, he and Evelyn opened the first Glatt Kosher Chinese restaurant in Queens. He and Benjy ran “Tain Lee Chow” for several years, Irv working in the kitchen with the smiling Chinese chef, a man named, coincidentally, Mr. Chow.  Irv always smelled like Chinese noodles in those days, it was one of his jobs to fry them.

“Yeah, that would have been a more gracious and accurate way to put it, sure.  But, don’t forget, you were burying your difficult father, making the arrangements, suddenly the man of the family, and you worked to get the draft of the eulogy to the Druid in time for the funeral, a funeral that was only a few days after I died and 1,200 miles away.  You can’t beat yourself up, Elie, I’m sure even if you ran it by mom first, she probably wouldn’t have even caught it, at that time,” said the skeleton.  

I don’t beat myself up.  I’ve learned not to do that, and it was the best lesson I ever struggled to learn.  I’ve sometimes wished you could have taught yourself the same thing.  I just understand now, as I am different by years of experience from how I was when I erased Benjy’s face from your life, that, if I ever have it to do over again, it is better to think of how to be generous than to be a thoughtless dick.  No matter how justified I might otherwise have been to have acted less than generously.  

“Point taken,” said the skeleton, “even though, you know, we disagree about how much a person can really change their nature.  I mean, I’m dead, so, sure, I’ve changed.  But outside of that, good luck.”

When I came down the hill after we buried you I said to Benjy, as we shook hands, “you were the son he never had” and he looked at me with great sadness and said “and he was the father I never had.”  That was as far as either of us knew how to go, I guess, and it had to be enough.

“It was enough,” said the skeleton.

ii

I woke up from a bizarre dream today thinking about something Immanuel Kant said.  “A human soul is of infinite worth,” and then the logical second part came to me “even though they are sold by the millions, wholesale, in the free market.”

“The soul of that little kitten who screamed when he was murdered the other night was of infinite worth.  The million children’s souls that went up the smokestacks in Poland were of infinite worth.  The soul of every Iraqi child incinerated or exploded in the fight to free Iraq from a ‘modern day Hitler’ was of infinite worth.  The people who trade in human souls just never got Kant’s memo, I guess,” said the skeleton.  

If you see God there in the afterlife, ask him about that, would you?

“Glad to see you still have a sense of humor, motherfucker,” said the skeleton with what he intended to be a wink.

The eulogist spoke:

They moved to Peekskill when “Azraelkeh” was a young boy where he grew up poor with his younger brother Paul.  Began kindergarten in Peekskill speaking only Yiddish, played sports, mastered English, graduated from Peekskill High in 1941.   At least one member of Irv’s class went on to serve as Mayor of Peekskill.

Irv was a member, as was Paul, of Boy Scout Troop 33 of the First Hebrew Congregation and they marched together in Peekskill parades under a banner representing the First Hebrew Congregation.    

These last two facts, the little mayor of Peekskill and the marching Hebrew Congregation Boy Scouts, are from my uncle.  First time I heard either one was at the grave.  

My Uncle Paul was my only uncle, my father’s younger brother.  My mother was an only child, so Uncle Paul was it for uncles for my sister and me.  My father only told one childhood story about him and his brother.  I have come to think this relative parsimony about tales from the past may be a generational thing.  At least this was generally true in my family, except for Eli, who was extremely generous with stories.   I have to say, in defense of their policy of general silence about the past, that it seems many of the stories would have been painful ones.

The story my father told about his little brother was the time they were alone at home and my father took the raw chopped meat that was waiting to be cooked for dinner and stuffed his helpless little brother’s mouth full of it.   Irv laughed, as at a fond memory, and told my sister and me the little story on more than one occasion.  It gave us a better idea of why our slight, delicate uncle always seemed to flinch around his much bigger older brother.  Uncle Paul would usually laugh a kind of inhaled, scraping laugh as he flinched, it sounded like a tin shovel encountering fine gravel.

The devil, one notices, is usually in the details.  The worst is sometimes betrayed by a single word.  If you’re not attentive, you can stumble right past the portal into the devilry, are left wondering what that infernal smell is.  The opposite is also true, a single word can make a great difference for the better.  It all depends on the word, of course.

The word I want to emphasize here is “poor”.  A single syllable that states the grim fact plainly and goes right by, having made its simple, terrible case.  

They moved to Peekskill when “Azraelkeh” was a young boy where he grew up poor with his younger brother Paul.

The reason they moved to Peekskill is so that Uncle Aren could look after his sister’s little family.  The three of them were in great distress down in the slums of New York City.  Azraelkeh, (the fond diminutive for Azrael) was an infant, already being subjected to great cruelty by Chava, his mother.  His father, Eliyahu, already poor, had lost his job wrestling herring barrels into Lower East Side shops and was unemployed.  There was no choice really as far as trying to deal with the misery of Aren’s sister’s situation.

“Where he grew up poor” carries a wallop, even as it is just a glancing blow in that sentence.  It is not hard to imagine how much misery there was for a young immigrant family in the slums of New York City in 1924.  Poverty today is the same horror for the poor, a timeless sentence, only probably even more violent today than back then.  It is not hard to picture the many terrors of that desperate, lawless section of town in 1924, 1925.

My father once mentioned a cousin of his, a young, handsome man, he said, who had taken his own life down in the misery of the Lower East Side of the 1920s.   America was the land of opportunity, home of The American Dream, but not everybody got to live the dream.  “I guess he suffered from what today would be called ‘Depression’,” said my father when he told me about that despairing young cousin.  

There is no telling how Aren wound up settling in Peekskill, a once thriving small town on the Hudson River fifty miles north of New York City.   When Aren arrived in New York City in 1904 he learned to vulcanize rubber.  This was at the dawn of the automobile, and his new skill was in increasing demand.  He worked in automobile-related fields for the rest of his life.  By 1925 he owned and operated a garage and service station in Peekskill.  He got wind of his little sister’s desperation and sent his rough son Eli down in the truck to pack up the little family and drive them up to Peekskill.    

Eli’s mother had died shortly after he was born.   Aren was unable to care for the baby, he had to work.  He felt he had no choice but to give the baby up for adoption.  His dead wife’s mother and sisters would not hear of it.   They took the baby Eli and raised him.  They had a farm in the Bronx.  The four women doted on little Eli.  

“When I was four, five years old, I ruled that place.  Whenever I said something, it was done.  I spoke and those women jumped.  My word was law!” he told a friend of mine in his rough voice.   She laughed, which caused Eli’s smile to become electric.  His hand on her knee, he leaned forward and whispered “which was very, very bad…”  

The little king did not take kindly to being disrespected by a teacher in High School, or by anybody else for that matter.   Weeks from graduation, with a large boil under the collar of his shirt, he told Mr. Pimsler, a Jewish teacher, a guy he generally liked, that he had to go out to his post in the hall.  The principal of DeWitt Clinton had enlisted his borderline juvenile delinquent students as the hall monitors, the Dotie Squad.  They kept order and got a feeling of pride and participation in a school that otherwise held limited interest for them.

“Pimsler told me ‘sit the hell down, Gleiberman, I’ll tell you when you can go,’ and I went to the door, told him I was sorry, but I was on the Dotie Squad and I couldn’t be late to my post.  He tried to stand in front of me, stop me, and I pushed past him and had my hand on the door knob when he grabbed me by the neck and busted that boil.  I saw red!  My fist flew out and I decked him, he went down.  I hated to do it, I had nothing against Pimsler, it was just a reaction.  Anyway, it was a few weeks before graduation, and I just walked out of the school and never went back.”

For some reason Eli didn’t get the unreservedly warm reception he was expecting when he shortly thereafter moved up to Peekskill to live with his father, his father’s second wife, Tamarka, and their children, his half-sister, the brilliant and beautiful Nehama, and half-brother, the brilliant and soon to be fabulously wealthy Dave.  He was also, according to him, unceremoniously welcomed to Peekskill by the brothers whose father owned the hardware store.  

“They stood in front of me on the sidewalk and said ‘hey, you’re that kyke Aren’s boy, aren’t you, the little Jew bastard from New York City?’ and I said to the one with the big mouth ‘that’s right’ and I decked him.  He went right down and the other two got out of the way.  ‘Nice to meet you, boys,’ I said.  They didn’t say much to me after that.  There were a lot of Klansmen in Peekskill back then.  If you took any shit from them, it would be very bad for you.”

Eli took Aren’s truck and drove the long way down to New York City to pick up his beloved Aunt Chava and her family.  In those days it was an arduous trip from New York City to Peekskill.  As children my sister and I were taken to Peekskill a couple of times, when my father visited the graves of his parents.  

It seemed to us hours away, the trip was grueling, with an aspect of time travel.  We both had the strong sense we were not traveling back to a time when ice cream was plentiful and everybody played happily until it got dark out every night.  I was shocked when we drove to my father’s funeral, on modern highways, that the trip only took about forty minutes.  

In 1925 or 1926, it was not a short trip.  There was a ferry that took passengers up the Hudson River and made a stop at Peekskill.  That trip by water was probably as fast as driving the narrow, winding roads back then, in the automobiles of the day.  There was also a train that could take you to Peekskill, probably in three or four hours.   But the little family on the Lower East Side needed to pack up everything, what little they owned, and put it on Aren’s truck for the move.  Eli reports they had very little by way of possessions.  I picture the four of them driving pressed together in the cab of the truck, my infant father on his father’s lap.

In a short time Paul would be born in Peekskill.  The boys would learn English, march as Jewish Boy Scouts through the streets of their hostile little town, play ball, graduate High School and, as soon as they could, leave Peekskill forever.   A few other things also happened in those years, and I will detail some of them in the next installment.